Way off. Maybe it fits some, but is far from definitive "introvert". Maybe some are fear-driven, but author seems to miss the point that many (most?) introverts just LIKE solitude, communicating thru contemplative mediums, are more about doing than talking, and just find smalltalk insufferably boring/pointless.
Post sounds more like a non-introvert trying to understand & explain, having concluded "well, they're just afraid of disruptive contact with others." No, we just don't like expending resources on the uninteresting.
The OP clearly has Social Anxiety Disorder, also known as "social phobia". The result is introversion, but the cause is a psychiatric issue. You joke, but the OP is likely legitimately afraid of making eye contact.
It's too bad people with Social Anxiety (like me) are just told their "introverted" or "shy" their whole lives. Social Anxiety is a very real psychiatric disorder that should be identified and treated in people like this.
> The OP clearly has Social Anxiety Disorder, also known as "social phobia".
Has anyone considered that giving an empty name to a description adds nothing to the conversation? Until the day Social Anxiety Disorder shows up in an electron micrograph (pics or it didn't happen), it's something that psychologists made up, like Asperger Syndrome (now abandoned) or homosexuality as a mental illness (abandoned in the 1970s).
The fight against homosexuality as a mental illness was terrifying to watch. Many professionals appeared before hearings wearing masks, to argue against this addition to their oppression, before psychologists finally realized their disease mongering was causing real harm and removed homosexuality from the DSM.
With Asperger's it was exactly the opposite -- it was an attractive diagnosis, everyone wanted it, such that psychologists finally realized they had created a monster lacking the clear definition that might have brought it under control.
I really wish the Scientology-esque anti-psychology crowd would stop using the struggles of queer people as an excuse to be anti-scientific.
Social anxiety disorder definitely exists, it can be treated chemically (meaning that it is biologically real), and arguing about this anyway is a fundamental misunderstanding of how mental illnesses are defined and diagnosed.
Virtually every mental illness include a diagnostic criteria of interference with normal life functioning. If you have the symptoms the OP has and you feel you live a normal, happy life, you do not have social phobia.
Further, saying that social anxiety is something "psychologists made up" is grossly insulting to people who actually have the disorder. Saying that recognizing it as a disordered state and not as "just being shy" adds nothing is grossly insulting as well. Some people live their whole lives, afraid of making eye contact, ruminating on every interaction, thinking that they are just "awkward" or "shy" or "introverted" and as a result never form close connections to humans and die alone.
I hope the OP gets the help he or she needs, and I hope that you stop standing in his or her way.
> I really wish the Scientology-esque anti-psychology crowd would stop using the struggles of queer people as an excuse to be anti-scientific.
You mean, like Thomas Insel, sitting director of the NIMH, who recently described psychiatry as pseudosciene and announced the abandonment of the DSM, on the common-sense ground that it has no scientific content? Read more here:
Maybe you could read up on current events in the field before posturing as though you know what's up?
As to "anti-scientific" there is nothing more anti-scientific than a group of people who invent diseases by voting rather than research, that we're all supposedly suffering from. Asperger's was included in DSM-IV by vote, not research. Asperger's was removed from DSM-5 by vote, not research. As a result, the DSM is being abandoned along with Asperger's.
> Virtually every mental illness include a diagnostic criteria of interference with normal life functioning.
That's true, and that is why the DSM is being abandoned -- it's a description of symptoms with no hint of causes, and in a scientific era, that is both absurd and offensive. Here's what NIMH director Insel said as he announced the DSM's abandonment:
Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better."
By the way. Insel isn't a Scientologist, he's a psychiatrist. Like many in the field, it has come to him that psychiatry is standing in the way of progress toward a scientific approach to mental illness diagnosis and treatment.
Personal attacks are unbecoming. I probably have more experience in this area than you do. But I'm not going to stoop so low as to use logical fallacies, because I'm confident that I'm on the right side of this particular disagreement. You don't seem to be. It's worth noting your entire argument is an appeal to authority or a personal attack.
For what it's worth, though, I think that it's positive for the NIMH to move away from DSM guidelines for research, because research should inform the DSM, not the other way around. Further, the DSM and mental health as a whole has been trending towards cultural models of mental illness rather than authoritarian mindsets that attempt to proscribe rather than describe.
Ironically, the main reason for doing so is the backlash the psychology community suffered from the categorization of homosexuality and gender identity disorder. This is why modern mental illness diagnosis requires an interference with life functioning, as decided by the patient, not the medical establishment. I think this is generally the right way for the community to go in, for a couple of reasons.
For one, very few mental illnesses will have an empirically detectable "cause" aside from some combination of experiences. It's not clear by any stretch that all mental illnesses have even a biological component. The (empirically detectable) success of cognitive-behavioral therapy seems to indicate that since minds can be built in any number of ways, they can also be broken and need repair purely using their own mechanisms.
If someone has PTSD because they were sexually assaulted, it's not clear to me that you could ever say with empirical validity (beyond what the DSM already provides you) that they have any disorder. You could be neurologically reductionist, but even if that's possible it's several years off before that's an effective diagnostic mechanism, and even then the original cause of the disorder is far removed from the person's life, leaving only... the symptoms.
Second, disregarding the subjective distress of the patient is the path towards medicalization of abnormality, just as happened with homosexuality, hysteric personality disorder, etc.. In the extreme cases, legal structures exist to determine if a person is not responsible for themselves. At the end of the day, mental health is inherently socially constructed rather than objective, and you're never going to be able to bottom out to something objective.
To say that the DSM is devoid of scientific context is simply false; the DSM is written by scientists, based on all available scientific research available at present. It evolves, like everything else does. I don't think there's any better way to resolve disagreements among scientists than by voting; it's worth noting that medicine as a whole merely allows individual practitioners to make their own judgments as opposed to regulating the field, which is a definite trade-off without a clear winner.
> It's worth noting your entire argument is an appeal to authority or a personal attack.
You mean, like when I pointed out that Asperger's was created and destroyed by votes rather then scientific evidence? Or was it when I pointed out that the NIMH is abandoning the DSM because it lacks scientific content?
As to personal attack, physician, heal thyself.
> To say that the DSM is devoid of scientific context is simply false ...
"While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better."
On that basis, on that evidence, you should address your beliefs about the DSM to the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the country, rather than to me. Of course, if you actually understood what constitutes science, you wouldn't be taking the position you are.
> I don't think there's any better way to resolve disagreements among scientists than by voting ...
Ah. Now I see the problem. Scientific questions are never resolved by voting -- not ever. They are all resolved by empirical evidence. For questions that cannot be resolved by evidence, scientists adopt the null hypothesis, the precept that an idea is false until it is supported by evidence.
The bottom line is that a scientist would never say, "We don't know what this is, but let's offer clinical treatments anyway -- because the public doesn't understand either science or our poverty of knowledge."
This is why Insel, and his predecessor, Steve Hyman, have taken the positions they have. This is why psychiatry and psychology are in the midst of an historical transformation, one that faces up to the fact that they are not scientific enterprises and considers a course of corrective action.
Yes, I read that quote when you posted it the first time. I notice you've posted it many times in this thread, so maybe you got confused.
By the way, the director of the NIMH isn't the "highest-ranking psychiatrist". That title doesn't exist.
>Ah. Now I see the problem. Scientific questions are never resolved by voting -- not ever. They are all resolved by empirical evidence. For questions that cannot be resolved by evidence, scientists adopt the null hypothesis, the precept that an idea is false until it is supported by evidence.
This is not true.
In most fields, including general medicine, there is no governing licensing body similar to the APA. This is because psychiatry is the only medical discipline that postdates the concept of regulatory bodies.
In general medicine, it's very common for two doctors to treat the same illness differently. This is why cancer patients can choose between radiology and surgery and chemotherapy.
Now, the APA could abandon the concept of regulation and allow any licensed psychiatrist to treat anything in any way, but as a society we've democratically (by vote) decided that psychiatry should be regulated, so its regulatory body decides the treatments that can and cannot be administered, and what constitutes something worth treating. (If you want to go outside this structure, you just can't call the person you're getting treatment from a psychiatrist. Priests, consolers, social workers, etc., are examples of alternatives.)
So, the world does not work the way you think it does. This is because you're espousing a philosophy of science called Positivism or Verificationism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism
...which holds that ideas compete via aggregate evidence judged by each individual scientist, gaining ground via confirmatory evidence (though never being proven) and losing ground via falsifying evidence.
>The bottom line is that a scientist would never say, "We don't know what this is, but let's offer clinical treatments anyway -- because the public doesn't understand either science or our poverty of knowledge."
This is also not true. Doctors offer treatments that aren't definitively explained all the time. It's far better to treat something however you can than to hold off for some logical positivist verification of your claim.
--------------
But, you've said a lot about what other people think. What is your opinion, and how did you form it?
> By the way, the director of the NIMH isn't the "highest-ranking psychiatrist". That title doesn't exist.
Of course it does. In psychiatry, authority matters. In science, it doesn't. How else could Insel unilaterally describe psychiatry as a pseudoscience and rule that the DSM is to be abandoned, as he recently did? That would never be accepted in a scientific field, where authority is disparaged.
How else could a panel of authorities vote to include some imaginary conditions, and exclude other imaginary conditions, from the latest DSM? They did just that, and one change from the past was that the votes were held in secret. Another difference was that the governmental agencies that rely on the DSM have decided to abandon it.
>>The bottom line is that a scientist would never say, "We don't know what this is, but let's offer clinical treatments anyway -- because the public doesn't understand either science or our poverty of knowledge."
> This is also not true. Doctors offer treatments that aren't definitively explained all the time.
This kind of reply makes me wonder what is the point of this exchange. Doctors are not scientists, they are to medical research what an engineer or a technician is to a scientist in another field. Further, if a doctor really offered a treatment not vetted by research, he would have his license pulled.
> What is your opinion, and how did you form it?
My opinions are irrelevant, and I have not been expressing opinions, but facts. Note my use of literature references to support any facts I post.
Axis 2 disorders like Social Anxiety Disorder appear in the data as stable clusters of symptoms. Attaching a name to that stable cluster of phenomena is no different from attaching a name to the stable cluster of phenomena we call "smallpox". And attaching a name to the phenomenon is the first step toward identifying the causes and figuring out the cure (or even if it needs to be cured.)
So yes, lots and lots of people have considered whether or not giving something a name adds anything to the conversation, and we have generally found it does. We have a lot of powerful tools for thinking, and words are one of the better ones.
Does this mean we never make mistakes? Of course not, but unlike every other approach, isolating clusters of symptoms by an act of selective attention and reifying them with a name has long proven to be an extremely useful approach, so we keep on doing it even though we get it wrong sometimes. The great thing about science is that unlike every other approach to the world, it corrects itself fairly reliably, although sometimes it takes more than a generation to do so.
> Attaching a name to that stable cluster of phenomena is no different from attaching a name to the stable cluster of phenomena we call "smallpox".
False! The difference, as you would know if you had any understanding of science, is that we know what causes smallpox. Mental illnesses are defined by their symptoms, not by their causes, for the simple reason that we don't know their causes.
This is why the DSM is being abandoned -- it's a listing of symptoms of ailments no one understands. And the man behind the program to abandon it is a psychiatrist:
> We have a lot of powerful tools for thinking, and words are one of the better ones.
Sure, here's one. A mental illness diagnosis dating back to before the Civil War -- Drapetomania, the tendency of slaves to run away from their masters:
Do you know why slaves who ran away were diagnosed with a mental illness, instead of their masters for owning human beings? Easy to answer -- the masters had money to pay psychologists.
A quote from the article: "Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness described by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 that caused black slaves to flee captivity.[1]:41 Today, drapetomania is considered an example of pseudoscience,[2]:2 and part of the edifice of scientific racism.[3] Thomas Szasz mentions Drapetomania in his book, The Myth of Mental Illness, as an example of how psychiatry, when calling certain people "diseased", attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents, in order to better control them."
> ... isolating clusters of symptoms by an act of selective attention and reifying them with a name has long proven to be an extremely useful approach ...
Yes, but it cannot compare to doing science. Science requires explanations, falsifiable theories, empirically testable against reality. Psychology is satisfied with descriptions.
I wouldn't describe it as an illness, but Asperger Syndrome is absolutely a thing and I'm not sure why you think it's abandoned.
It's an attractive diagnosis because it gives jerky nerds an excuse to act like a jerk, but (just like so many things), the fact that it's over-self-diagnosed doesn't mean that there aren't people with legitimate problems.
Edit: Ah, I guess you're saying that it's "abandoned" because the diagnosis is no longer "You have Aspergers Syndrome" and now "You fall somewhere on the autistic spectrum"?
> I wouldn't describe it as an illness, but Asperger Syndrome is absolutely a thing and I'm not sure why you think it's abandoned.
Excuse me? It has been abandoned -- it was voted out of DSM-5 (the current version), by the same people who voted it into DSM-IV. It is gone. Read more:
Simple enough? The reason it was abandoned is because it was widely abused by opportunistic therapists to exploit people who think mental illnesses can be made up without benefit of science.
> It's an attractive diagnosis because it gives jerky nerds an excuse to act like a jerk, but (just like so many things), the fact that it's over-self-diagnosed doesn't mean that there aren't people with legitimate problems.
Yes, and the fact that "vapors" is no longer accepted as a medical condition doesn't mean no one gets cancer -- it means there are fewer quacks practicing medicine.
> Edit: Ah, I guess you're saying that it's "abandoned" because the diagnosis is no longer "You have Aspergers Syndrome" and now "You fall somewhere on the autistic spectrum"?
Yes, exactly as though someone now says, "You're more interesting than the average person" instead of saying, "Your're queer and need therapy." Yes, there is a difference.
Gotta agree that it's way off "introvert" and way closer to "person with control and boundary concerns, trying to define 50% of the population's behavior"
I'm not really an introvert, but I seem like one. It's because I have a _lot_ going on, and parts of it require quiet time to do.
I have to mention that Asperger's is no longer an official diagnosis -- it's been dropped from the DSM for an excellent reason (too easy to assign the diagnosis to nearly anyone).
This will all change when we begin explaining mental illness, rather than describing it as we do now.
Yeah, I'm not even sure how much it applies to the author himself; IIRC, Rands was a team leader for a long while, doing more with people than with - for example - code and notebooks.
I don't think I fit in any of these boxes. Before I ever took the Myers Briggs or read Quiet[1] or people started talking a lot about I and E and other shortcuts I realized that I was different than most of my friends and that I needed to change. I was 14 and wanted to be able to carry on wide ranging conversations in the effortless manner that many of my friends and the adults in my life could.
So I watched an older brother of a classmate(he was a senior in HS) who could talk for hours about anything. I watched people at church and at family gatherings and community celebrations like 4th of July parades and Labor Day barbecues.
And I learned how to make small talk and how to engage people around me and I learned that I could find out interesting things about people and that many times you had to go through a ritual of small talk, sometimes for months worth of meetings and greetings and regularly seeing someone before you really learned anything about them.
And I learned that usually it was worth it. And eventually as I got older and became an adult I learned to tell when someone just didn't know how to talk about something difficult and so they talked about nothing and everything instead and how to read them and help them just by talking something over with them.
To quote Jane Austen:
"I certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done."
"My fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault -- because I would not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution."
as an alternative, i've heard these definitions of introvert / extravert:
an introvert is someone who recharges their social energy by going off somewhere familiar and likely alone.
An extrovert is someone who recharges by going off to be with lots of people and commotion.
...what i like about these definitions is that neither are anti-social. both can be "the life of the party" or "the quieter ones". ...is more about where your charging cradle is.
This fits better for me. I have two modes: I can either be "the life of the party" as I am right now. I try to spend most of my weekends out with friends, never being alone and I get antsy when am faced with a weekend alone. I spend my weeknights relaxing and cleaning.
Or give me a project I'm interested in, and you won't see me during the weekends for months. I'll be content to go out for a meet or two during the week but any large block of time will be consumed by my hobby.
No matter which extreme I'm in, I need a quiet place and a solitary activity to recharge. When I'm the life of the party, it's quiet week nights alone. When I'm on a project, it's the in the evening on the weekends after working on a project all day.
and what if you find things like small talk the most boring thing in your life which simply steals your energy in such big chunks that you can last only couple short conversations, while there is nothing more powering in your life than having a great debate, and it doesn't really matter much whether it is with your friends or strangers.
I have always found people classifications slightly weird thing, not because there is something fundamentally wrong with it, but because of how majority of the people perceives them. We tend to simplify things in our heads, and most of us start to treat these classifications as a final explanation to things (using as a labels), without remembering that when it comes to classifying people (especially their character), classification at its best is nothing more than a guideline and should be treated cautiously.
Well at least this is how I see the world and people around me.
at the extreme end, i once heard someone say "there are two kinds of people in the world : those who say there are two kinds of people and those who don't."
That fits better with me as well. I'm not shy, or socially awkward, I just quite often would rather be at home reading a book to relax instead of "socialising".
Ditto: I tell jokes, stories, laugh with friends and family, and jump in to jump-start gatherings that seem inappropriately quiet(1)...
...and then I go clean up the kitchen, because I really, really need to get away from everyone.
At work, it can be similar: A long productive meeting, lots of good stuff accomplished (planning, design, what-have-you) and BAM! my buffers are full, I need to get away, recharge my batteries and drain those buffers. Many others want to keep going, I want to be away from the world.
For at least a few minutes.
(1) Yes, "inappropriately" is subjective, and yes, mistakes are made - but fewer mistakes are made than gatherings enlivened - and memories are always made!
Business trips are the worst. You spend all day in meetings in people and then they (entirely good naturedly) invite you out for a meal in the evening.
No thanks. I'd rather be sitting in my hotel room in my underwear eating room service and reading my Kindle.
I've felt the same way for a long time, after I heard it from somewhere (I forget where).
For example, some of my coworkers think I'm an extrovert because I can be super social/engaged/draw other people out of their shell/etc, but they don't see when I get off work I go home and disappear from the world to recharge from all that.
I am fascinated by how you punctuate your sentences with your hands. You pause for as long as it takes to makes sure you are going to say something of value. Sometimes these pauses are maddeningly long. You are fiercely optimistic and state outlandish impossible things. You are fearless in giving feedback to strangers. You are less fearless, but you can deliver the same feedback with a momentary glance. It’s fascinating how all of you have built all of your systems to get through your day. I am fascinated because…
Even though I believe I can do almost anything, I can't imagine myself being like you...
Until I learned how to write.
I write like you talk. When you call, I email. When you skype, I tweet. When you take to the room, I take to the forum.
I like the stuff that you bring to the table. I like your Cave. Can I see your Cave? Can I show you my Cave? I want to share the ideas from Cave with your ideas.
You are frusturating.
Why don't you return my emails? I share your passion. I share your ideas. I just want to engage with you to create something bigger and better. I enjoy learning and sharing. I feel that we can learn more together. Why don't you just give me a shot? I'm willing to take risks but you are stuck in your own comfortable situation. Let's break on through together.
This isn't describing an introvert in any way. I'd guess this is more along the autism spectrum, but even that's an inflammatory statement said from someone who doesn't have the proper background to speculate (probably like most of us here).
I seem to be at the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm pretty good at smalltalk, sociable, do not dislike eye contact, etc. but most people seem... boring.
So you went shopping? Huh, I don't care. But tell me something interesting and, oh boy, I can chat for hours.
It's like I had already beaten the game and were patiently waiting for the sequel. Fortunately DLCs are released once in a while ;)
People do tend to have boring conversations, but individual people are almost always Extremely Interesting if you can get to the layer underneath the standard communication protocol.
Conversely, if you can't at least feign interest in the minor minutiae of my life, why the fuck would I want to share anything I'm actually passionate about with you? Would be a waste.
I don't follow your logic. Why would it be a waste? Wouldn't it actually be a waste of both your resources and mine if I feigned interest? You'll keep talking, and my mind will keep drifting.
I understand smalltalk is necessary to break the ice. I'm perfectly fine with the "How you doin'? Fine. It's hot today, isn't it? Well last week was worse!" exchange. I can even understand the "I went shopping" comment.
What I don't really welcome is a walk through your shopping day.
I love this one. I recognize myself in most of this (and linked) descriptions (GTD notebook, lol). Except for the bits I don't.
But the thing is, the bits that do not reflect me are because I had life experiences that taught me the value of skills to acquire those other habits.
For example, I am no longer afraid of small talk (most of the time) and random people. But, I used to be. I know exactly when it changed. When dotcom bubble burst, I chose to do a senior tech support job for three years. Going into the job, I had no people skills. Leaving it, I had plenty and kept developing. Turned out to be a super-useful skill in our "public communication shy" general community. And by combining ability to communicate with geek's ability to connect the dots and see the critical communication path, I can do things that are hard for people with only one of those skills.
Of course, now I see pretty much all of my projects/activities as "Hero's Journey". But that's another discussion.
Some introverts are prone to rushes of sociability, what I heard that really clicked with me was that it's how you relax or recharge. If you relax or recharge best alone then you're basically introverted, if you relax or recharge best by being social you're basically extroverted. I can be incredibly social and am prone to frenzies of activity that cause many to think of me as an extroverted person. Afterwards however I need to retreat to my space and spend a lot of time alone to recharge, also if I don't get that alone time for too long I end up run down and worn out. It's just part of the fun. I would definitely say there are pros and cons to both sides the biggest seem to be that introverted people lose out since we are such a socially connected society while gaining in independent action. Extroverts seem to effortlessly maintain social connections that they often can use as resources however often suffer from loneliness or fear of being alone. These are purely my own experiences of course, YMMV. In any case learning to relax and your own particular way of doing it is important no matter what category you feel most comfortable under.
I'm increasingly thinking that the E/I distinction is not useful and maybe even harmful. It causes too many assumptions and generalizations that aren't valid classifications or often even close to it. This is a good example.
Personalities are complex. People can be introverted or extroverted. They can also have personality disorders and deficiencies independent of the two. I think generalizing and pigeon holing either introverts or extroverts does them a disservice.
Above all, people are incredibly malleable and adaptable. Most people are somewhere in the middle, or go through several states of personality based on their experience and stage of life. I know I have.
Not introverted, more like Aspergers or obsessive-complsive I would think. This description covers some aspects of introversion, but most of it was not typical introversion. You can be a messy, uninterested, boring and unintelligent slob of an introvert - it doesn't matter.
Introversion/Extroversion is not a polar-thing like gender anyway. I dislike it when you do tests/training/exercises or whatever and they declare "You are Introverted" or "You are Extroverted" like it is a single binary option that you can only ever be one of the other.
I've always thought of it as more shades of grey (in both directions).
In the article the author refers to his want to return to his cave. It made me think, today's cave is connected to the web. Not only is there an endless archive of knowledge in this cave, but it also can be a social place (via online collaboration). I'm wondering, what fellow introverts did in their caves before caves were connected to the web? Were caves filled with library books? How did we satisfy the need for collaboration while being in the cave?
Like others said, writing; actually, not much has changed since then, other than that the letters are written much faster and delivered / replied to instantly. Read biographies or stories about the pre-internet scientists (Einstein, Hawking, andsoforth), and you'll find a lot of references to letters written. In fact, the biographies are often based on those.
There's a lot more letters written nowadays (electronically), and a lot of those are short-lived and easily forgotten. Exceptions are those posted on news groups or meticulously archived. Everything someone has ever written on the internet is a veritable treasure trove of people's opinions and lives and whatnot, probably even moreso than personal diaries from back in the day. Also a lot more static.
It reminds me of my grandfather (that I barely knew). He was spending a lot of time in the basement where he kept tons of books. He liked to read, paint and build things there. He also had pen pals from other countries. Writing letters was a big thing at that time! There was quite a lot to do in their caves even without the internet.
There was (is?) a whole mail-relay postal service culture. In the mid-90s my grandmother was a node in semi-formalized mailing list system that more than anything resembled a mimeograph version of Reddit. you'd get packets of stuff (jokes, photos, recipes, poems, stories, coupons, what-have-you) from people and sort of mix and match them and send them on to other people in your mailing list who'd like them, copying the good stuff and pruning the uninteresting.
I remember seeing literally the same fw: fw: fw: jokes that were circulating on BBSes at the time being circulated on hand-typed pages.
thats really cool. as i was writing my comment above i was imagining that there must have been something just like that. ..but would never have guessed it existed in the 90s!
I don't know why you were downvoted, I think you were spot on.
I'll bet that a lot of history's great letter-writers were introverts. Much of this sort of collaboration took place over weeks and months instead of seconds and minutes, and took place asynchronously.
I'd be willing to bet that many early members of the Royal Society were highly social introverts - Society meetings satisfied their need for synchronous collaboration, but most of their work was done alone or in small groups.
I've been two different kinds of introverts over the course of my life. One is as rands describes it: A person in their cave not wanting their life to be disturbed. The other kind is the type who can and understands how to interact with you, but usually would rather be deep in thought solving my latest puzzle.
But those times when I make room for socializing... woof. Those are some good times. :)
i just like quiet and solitude. people are so noisy and they are always talking and asking so many questions. and some of them despise quiet so much that they will fill any silent patches with artificial noise - radios or talking to themselves or humming, or tapping or whatever. and i am fine with this except when they feel that they must force their noise onto everybody else which they so often do.
This is an annoying trait my family has, it's becoming more noticeable when you're away from them for a while. Can't they just sit still for five minutes?
Not that I enjoy silence, mind; at home I usually have music or the TV on shortly after I arrive.
Why is wdewind's comment marked as [dead]? It's his first dead comment and seems completely respectful. Did it trigger some kind of bot detection or something?
Makes me think if any of my comments were marked as [dead] without me realizing too. Including this one I guess :P
Definitely not accurate. My wife is one of the most extroverted introverts I know. She loves spending time with other people and doesn't consider them threatening in the slightest. She just needs her downtime to recover from the energy she expends in being social.
I don't downvote as a matter of principle, but, wow, did I come close on this comment.
If I feel I need to communicate something, then practically by definition I am being selfish, self-indulgent when I do so. The world isn't asking for my comments, it doesn't need them, I make them because I WANT to.
But sometimes, sometimes, something one of us writes or records because we need to, because we want to, sometimes that bit of self-indulgence strikes a chord with someone else, resonates with them.
We are many who have been influenced by the writings of a cave dweller, by songs, by books, by poems, by encountering someone else's self-indulgent expression of an emotion that was for us inchoate until we found the other's words.
And then we understand ourselves.
I praise the self-indulgence of every writer who has ever dared expose themselves with words. I sing the glory of it.
Post sounds more like a non-introvert trying to understand & explain, having concluded "well, they're just afraid of disruptive contact with others." No, we just don't like expending resources on the uninteresting.